The Experiment:
In my second experiment I wanted to test the effectiveness of press releases. I figured this would probably be my best bet at getting my game noticed as I had been lucky enough to have a few sites review my game already without me asking. Considering they gave it good reviews, I felt positive that I could get a couple more to respond to my emails.
After sending the emails out, I let them run for a little over a week. A few of the sites I emailed a second time with a follow up email. Of the 15 or so places I emailed I was expecting a pretty low rate of reply. I figured that due to the nature of email I might get lucky with 2 or 3 sites, but that might be enough to drum up a little bit of attention. I felt more positive about the sites that cater to giving indies exposure, but also knew that they must get 50+ submissions per day.
The Result:
The final result of the number of sites that reported on my game are:
Number of places that reviewed my game: 0%.
Number of places that mentioned my game: 0%.
Number of places that looked at the press release: 6%
Number of places that downloaded the free copy of the game I sent: 0%.
Overall result: Level 5 Catastrophic Failure.
But my inbox was flooded:
Now here's the interesting part. While I didn't get any coverage from these sites, I did start getting one very specific type of email: sites started asking for a paid review.
It turns out that there is a large number of sites out there who will charge anywhere from $50-$200 to review your game. In exchange they'll give you a text review for a base price or a video review for a premium price. I don't know how your supposed to have an objective review when someone gave you $200 to do it, but that might be why several of these sites had nearly every game rated 5 stars. All these emails were followed up with very optimistic traffic numbers, the validity of which I don't know.
This seems to me like a pretty terrible industry that is, in my opinion, just exploiting indie devs who want to get their game out into the world. I'd like to think that most people would turn down these sites, but if their huge catalog of reviews is anything to go by that's not the case.
The lessons:
1) Sending out press-releases might be useful, but you really do need contacts first. Mike Rose mentions it fairly often in his article but it only now dawns on me how true that is. I don't really know anyone in the industry and I'm not sure how I would solve this. I see lots of articles online about how to get your game noticed, but not many articles of how to get the developer noticed first. It's a bit of a chicken/egg problem - How does one get their own name out without having a cool game to be noticed, but how does one get their cool game to be noticed without having a name? It sounds like that could be an article in itself.
2) While my press-release experiment was a terrible result, it was still extremely worthwhile process and I highly recommend it. In my case I thought I was ready to go once I had a full version, a demo version and a email to contact me at. It wasn't until I was reading the checklist that I realized how unprepared I was. So while the actual press release submission stage might be a bust, I highly recommend you actually send out at least a few for no other reason that it forces you to get prepared.
3) Without knowing anyone to contact in advance, sending out press-releases comes down to a lot of luck. That being said, there's always a chance you might get lucky! As a form of cold-calls I found press releases less effective, but these sites do cover a lot of games so you might be the lucky one that day.
Next Experiment
For the next experiment I'm going to try taking out some ads on sites like Facebook. I won't be spending much money, but I'll be interested to see what kind of conversion rates happen. I'll be making a blog post starting that experiment in the next few days,
This continues to be fascinating, even though this particular experiment proved rather disappointing.